Meta agrees to settle for $1.4B in bio­met­ric data lawsuit

U.S.-based global tech firm Meta agreed to settle for $1.4 billion in an unauthorized capture of personal biometric data lawsuit, the attorney general of the state of Texas announced Tuesday.

The company, which is the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, will stop its practice of capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law, Ken Paxton said in a statement.

The amount of the settlement is the largest ever obtained by a single American state, while it is the biggest privacy settlement an attorney general has ever obtained, much more than the $390 million settlement a group of 40 states obtained in late 2022 from Google.

It is also the first lawsuit brought and first settlement obtained under Texas's Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier (CUBI) Act, and it serves as a warning to companies engaged in practices that violate Texans' privacy rights, said the statement.

"After vigorously pursuing justice for our citizens whose privacy rights were violated by Meta's use of facial recognition software, I'm proud to announce that we have reached the largest settlement ever obtained from an action brought by a single State," said Attorney General Paxton.

"This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world's biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans' privacy rights. Any abuse of Texans' sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law," he added.

Meta in 2011 had introduced a new feature, initially called Tag Suggestions, that it claimed would improve the users' experience by making it easier for them to "tag" photos with the names of people in them, said the statement.

While Meta automatically turned this feature on for all Texans without explaining how the feature worked, it ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photos uploaded to Facebook for more than a decade, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted, it added.

"The company did this despite knowing that CUBI forbids companies from capturing biometric identifiers of Texans, including records of face geometry, unless the business first informs the person and receives their consent to capture the biometric identifier," it said.